Last week while I was at WebManiacs I decided I wanted to go with a different theme for my blog.  The GlossyBlue one was nice, but a lot of people are using it and I wanted to be a bit more unique.  I searched around and found a couple free WordPress themes and decided to port one over.  I must say skinning Mango is not as easy as I would like, but it isnt rocket science either.  I created a new skin in about 3 days, working via the plane, hotel room at night and this morning. I am not a CSS wizard so it could probably be done a lot faster if I had some more skillz.  I plan on skinning a couple more themes, which I will share.  This one however "BlueMoon" wont be shared until I decide to switch to a different one (sorry).

Laura did a pretty good job with the MangoBlog engine, it really has a lot of potential.  My only fuss is the docs need some love, I learned a lot about the MangoBlog engine by skinning my own.  There is still a lot I don't fully understand, in time hopefully I will. The Mate Docs (Flex Framework by AsFusion) are put together really well, maybe Mango Docs will aspire to them ;)

Oh quick note,  Mark Aplet also skinned a really nice theme.  He has the CSS talent I lack :)  Nice job Mark, you can download his skin here.

I created a new custom tag called "ShoppingAds".  I am not a fan of using custom tags in Mango, I prefer the plugins.  Why? Well with the custom tags you have to insert them into your skin templates and I honestly dont like doing that.  What if the skin template gets updated?  It becomes a pain to maintain/manage.  For now creating custom tags to handle Ads and such seems to be easier though so thats what I used. 

I am not sure if I am a fan of ShoppingAds, the javascript seems to slow down my page loads, but that may be because I went a little overboard on how many I am displaying (I need to fix that). 

Below is a couple things you want to do before implementing the tag on your mango powered blog site:

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I created a new Mango plugin, now you can add blip.tv videos easily using the Mango Post tool in the admin by adding a simple tag [bliptv:postId]. All you need to do is pass in the post ID when creating a new post in Mango and the video will display in the position of your posting. 

It is pretty basic right now.  I ping blip.tv''s API, pass them the post_ID and do some xmlParse/xmlSearch stuff and it returns the embed code.  The plugin just outputs that and displays it in your blog.  Like I said very simple and basic, I haven't figured out how to modify how the player gets displayed, such as height, width, options the player has on it, etc.... feel free to improve upon it :) You can thank my dog for waking me up at 6am on a Saturday morning for getting this done.

You can download the source here.
Just drop the bliptv folder in your "components/plugins/user" directory and it will display in your Mango Admin under Add-ons than all you need to do is activate it.

I got the idea after seeing a Thermo Video on Ryan Stewarts blog and figured what the heck, if WordPress can do it Mango can!!

I created a new mango plugin for the brightcove player, now you can add brightcove videos easily using the Mango Post tool in the admin by adding a simple tag [brightcove:videoid]. All you need to do is pass in the video ID when creating a new post in Mango and the video will display in the position of your posting.  I was inspired to create this plugin by Seb Duggan, who created the YouTube Plugin for Mango recently.  Like him, this was my first Mango plugin.  I plan on adding width, height and maybe some other useful features to the plugin soon.

You can download the source here. Read on to see the plugin in action!

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I have been using Mango blog now for about 3 months on this site and I have been using it on a internal company site for a little over a year.  Mango blog is continuing to blossom into a great coldfusion blog engine that is extremely easy to skin, Laura at AsFusion is doing a great job! 

Recently I wanted to add ads to my blog to try and monitize it a little bit (aka extra cash).  I originally thought about adding a plugin to Mango blog’s admin section, but realized one I don’t have a great understanding of the framework and two I wanted a quick way to add Google AdSense and Amazon Adsto my site. 

The second option relates directly to you know what, faster time to market – exactly!  So once I implemented both ad options using the standard copy/paste procedure and adding more junk in my mango skin I decided that I wanted to make it more reusable and clean it up a little.  You never know, the code could indeed become handy in the near future and honestly I like to keep things nice a neat.

So instead of going the plugin route I decided on a easier approach, I created four custom tags each one handles a piece of the ads on this blog:

• AdSense.cfm
• AdSearch.cfm
• AmazonDeals.cfm (In-Work)
• AmazonOmakase.cfm
  

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